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“I come out of court positive, confident and optimistic,” the former CIA officer said, thanking his lawyers and advisers.

Kiriakou noted that a series of prominent public figures have signed letters to Obama asking him to commute the sentence in the case. The signers include consumer activist Ralph Nader, former Justice Department official Bruce Fein, former Obama Afghanistan adviser Bruce Riedel, former Defense Department official Morton Halperin and actress Susan Sarandon.

Defense lawyers filed several letters with the court from Kiriakou’s former colleagues, attesting to his strong character and exemplary work for the CIA. They note he was a key player in the capture and interrogation of Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002.

If Kiriakou serves most or all of his 30-month sentence, it will be the stiffest ever served in a leak case.

A former Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklin, was sentenced in 2006 to 12½ years in prison for passing intelligence secrets about Iran to pro-Israel lobbyists and the news media. However, after Franklin cooperated with prosecutors, a judge lowered the sentence to probation and 10 months of “community confinement,” such as a halfway house.

In 2010, a contract linguist for the FBI, Shamai Leibowitz, got a 20-month sentence after pleading guilty to disclosing classified information to a blogger. The details of the information were never revealed in court or even to the judge overseeing the case, but The New York Times reported that the information was U.S. intelligence intercepts relating to the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Leibowitz served the bulk of his sentence and was released early last year.

In 2011, a major leak-related case against a former senior official at the National Security Agency, Thomas Drake, ended with him pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of exceeding authorized access to a government computer. He was sentenced to a year of probation after facing ten felony charges stemming from suspicions that he leaked classified information

Drake was in the courtroom Friday as Kiriakou’s sentence was meted out.

In the first media leak case in modern U.S. history, a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy was sentenced in 1985 to two years in prison for giving spy satellite photos of Soviet ships to the British publication Jane’s Defence Weekly. The analyst, Samuel Morison, served eight months before being paroled. President Bill Clinton pardoned Morison in 2001.

The Obama administration is also pursuing a court martial against Pvt. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst charged with giving hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and military reports to WikiLeaks. He faces a variety of charges, including a count of aiding the enemy. That charge carries a potential sentence of life in prison.